D-8 برآورد توان بالقوه تجارت ايران در گروه هشت

The Identification of Trade Potentials Between Iran and the Member Countries of D-8 Group

The trade cooperation has been one of the most important objectives of the formation of D-8, but the comparison of figures relating to trade flows between the member countries, demonstrate that, so far, considerable growth has not been achieved in intra-trade of the Group. The purpose of this paper is to identify the potentials of expanding trade between Iran on the one hand and the individual countries of the Group on the other hand. In doing so, the main emphasis has been put on the identification of potentials at commodity level. The paper, thus, attempts to find answer to the two following questions: 1-Is there possibility of increasing trade between Iran and individual countries of the Group? 2-The exchange of what commodities leads to the expansion of bilateral trade between Iran and the countries concerned? For determining the trade potentials, the simple estimation methodology for identifying the trade potentials is employed and the main variables used are the volume of trade between member states, their total trade and individual commodity trade at 6-Digit level of U.S. Code. The results indicate that there exists a fairly good potential for Iran to expand its volume of trade with individual countries of the D-8 Group, but in practice in most cases these potentials remain either untapped or underutilized.